What Kind of Art Is Related to Freuds Theory
The Aesthetics Of Freud
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March xi, 1973
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Jack J. Spector, chairman of the department of art history at Rutgers University, has written an exceptionally thorough and absorbing account of Freud'south ideas near art and artists. The study is organized in three parts. The offset, a discussion of the genesis of Freud's attitudes toward fine art and literature, examines the function his experiences in 19th‐century Vienna played in formulating his theories.
The second section explores Freud's assessments of the personalities of artists and his theories of art. This investigation draws on letters, passing remarks in works devoted to other subjects, such equally his "The Future of an Illusion," and Freud'south more systematic attempts to ascertain the work of art and its creator: in his studies of Michelangelo'due south "Moses," Leonardo's "Virgin and St. Anne," and the "Mona Lisa," and his study of Wilhelm Jensen'south story "Gradiva: Ein pompeianisches Phantasiestück" (Dresden, 1903).
The concluding chapters examine the influence of psychoanalysis on modern art and criticism. The importance of Freud's writings for the Surrealists is discussed at length, and Spector assuredly demonstrates the applicability of a psychoanalytic arroyo in his interpretations of a line from Joyce's "Finnegans Wake," as well every bit Magritte's painting "The Rape."
Freud admired those scientists of his twenty-four hours who were Renaissance men, devoting their lives both to studies of the physiology of urine as well as to theories about the fine arts. The objects Freud himself nerveless, described at length by Spector, indicate, as do many of his comments, a marked distaste for the art of his own fourth dimension. There are holes in the drove: landscapes, primitive fine art and the works of children and psychotics are significantly absent-minded. As with most collectors, Freud'south involvement with art was extremely personal and intimate. We learn, in fact, that he ofttimes fondled pieces in his collection while he talked, but not while he listened. The work of fine art posed more than than a scientific problem for the founder of psychoanalysis.
In most of Freud'south writings his personal presence is inescap able. For many critics the autobiographical graphic symbol of his piece of work is a major flaw, which impugns the veracity of his theories and restricts their application to all simply a few subjects. Simply for Spector it is precisely the personal side of Freud'due south esthetics which makes them compelling and forceful. Freud'south writings on fine art, similar so much of his other piece of work, are often confessional. His assay of the artist and the work of art are attempts at selfanalysis. This is especially evident in the study of Leonardo, whose life Freud divided into an artistically rich early menstruum and the, drier, scientific i of his later on years, when the unresolved conflicts of his babyhood stifled his artistic productivity. Freud establish in the life and piece of work of Leonardo many parallels with his ain experiences of childhood, his parents and his anxieties nearly his own homosexual impulses.
However, Freud'due south writings on art are not completely overshadowed by his search for cocky‐knowledge; they comprise numerous insights and stimulating ideas, some of them conflicting, about the artist, literature, painting and sculpture. The artist, for Freud, is characterized by the flexibility with which he handles repression: he turns his most personal wishes and fantasies into art through a transformation which "softens the offensive aspects of these wishes, conceals the origin in the creative person, and by observing artful rules, offers other men an incentive bonus." The "incentive bonus" is the sugar‐coating (in Spector'southward words) of the piece of work of fine art—its surface, musical qualities. For Freud, these qualities of course and color, which he reviled in the Impressionism of his time, serve as a come‐on to the viewer, after which the sexual and emotional pleasure of the work tin be tapped and experienced. Spector astutely likens this view to Darwin'south noting of the role of flashy, decorative animal skins and plumage as lures for mates.
Spector's most important contribution concerns the relationship of spectator to object. He has discovered evidence in Freud's writings of a sketchily presented theory of "ideational mimetics": a relationship of exchanges of energy (physical and mental) between the viewer and the piece of work of art, in some respects like to empathy. The exchange replaces gross motor exertion and muscular expenditures of energy, with an increase in intellectual worka shift Freud believed to be fundamental to the development of a higher level of civilization.
Freud's famous patient, the Wolf‐Human, tells us that "Freud had a special souvenir for finding a happy residue in everything he undertook." Judging from Mr. Spector'south give-and-take of Freud's esthetics, that sense of balance is wanting in Freud's approach to art; information technology is upset by an unusually close personal identification with the lives of certain artists, and an oblique approach to the work of art itself: an unresponsiveness to its formal aspects. In sure respects Freud was conspicuously insensitive to the language of forms. In the "New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis," for example, he claims that primitive languages have no grammer —a view shared by most of his contemporaries.
Although Freud did not treasure the lines, forms and colors of paintings and sculptures as much as he enjoyed their subjects, he was surprisingly aware of sure issues of signs—their formulation, behavior and representation—peculiarly equally these questions chronicle to the modes of representation in dreams. Thus, there are many references, especially in "The Interpretation of Dreams," to the relationship between representation and meaning in the visual arts.
These observations on such subjects as the representation of conversation (in medieval art), and the pictorial devices for indicating fourth dimension and the episodes of narrative (in the Renaissance), provide analogies to the dream‐work, and they are most definitely concerned with problems of form and structure. Taken together, these speculations, undoubtedly based on a close reading of paintings and sculpture, enable the states to make up one's mind how the psychoanalytic material of a piece of work, its images and their symbolism, are conveyed by a carefully structured visual vehicle.
Spector minimizes the importance of these often aphoristic, passing remarks, still they are a surprising and significant part of Freud's esthetics, inseparable from the symbolic language of dreams and neuroses he labored to explicate. Undervaluing this aspect of Freud's esthetics colors the manner in which Spector (and for that affair, most Freudian critics of art) applies psychoanalytic principles to painting. In the Surrealists, for instance, the disquieting composites and condensations of images which nosotros find are dream‐style analogues. Freud's piece of work legitimized the material images — drawn from dreams, the unconscious, sexual fantasies and neuroses—simply in addition to this past at present familiar rehearsal of the Freudian's stock‐in‐merchandise, nosotros should too note Freud's contribution to the devices ‐‐ the technical metaphors—made in such paintings as Magritte'due south.■
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